


Zelinski

by Jackie Thomas (Jackie_Thomas)



Category: Lewis (TV)
Genre: Child death - not graphic, Episode: s04e01 The Dead of Winter, M/M, Prequel to The Dead of Winter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-25
Updated: 2014-10-25
Packaged: 2018-02-22 14:03:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,395
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2510378
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jackie_Thomas/pseuds/Jackie%20Thomas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"The attic was dark, dusty, confined.  I lifted the lid from the water cistern…”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Zelinski

**Author's Note:**

> What happens between Lewis and Hathaway during the Dead of Winter has its roots in the Zelinski case. This is the story of the Zelinski case.

James and I drive back overnight, not wanting to delay our return to Oxford by checking into a hotel. We have been interviewing the Middlesbrough branch of the missing girl’s family; her father who left before she was born and his relatives. An interesting bunch it has to be said, and not unknown to the local police. But we find nothing to suggest they would have anything to do with this or any child’s disappearance. An entire day of interviewing gets us nowhere.

It is now sixty hours since Evie Price, a ten year old local girl went missing after her friend’s birthday party and we are still without concrete leads. DCI Roy Rhodes is in charge of the case and he is sending every spare body to interview anyone connected with the child or the church hall where the party was held. He sounds worn out when I speak to him but HOLMES2, the police major incident computer system, which has been processing the evidence, is tirelessly churning out actions for investigators to follow. There are more witnesses to interview, more records to check. I tell him we’ll be in as soon as we can.

I doze off in the car and James leaves me to sleep even though it is a long journey and we should be sharing the driving. I wake to a whispered, ‘sir’ and find we are outside my house.

“Why don’t you get a few hours’ rest?” He says. “I’ll head back, process the statements and pick up our next actions. No sense both of us wasting our time on that.”

“I appreciate it, James, but the minute my head hits the pillow I won’t be able to shut my eyes.” He accepts the truth of this with a nod. “But since we’re here,” I say. “Let’s get something to eat and a shower. There’s a suit of yours somewhere around if you want to change.”

He gives his arm a disdainful sniff, “This one’s starting to follow its own lines of enquiry.”

“Well I hope it’s having more luck than we are.” 

I scramble eggs and make toast and when we have eaten he goes for a shower. He looks tidier but just as weary when he returns. By the time I’ve taken my turn James has washed up and is outside smoking, sitting on the bench I have in my garden. I make a round of tea and push the door open to call him in. I see he has fallen asleep, his head propped up on one hand which also holds a cigarette burning itself out. He wakes as I take the cigarette from him.

“You’re going to set yourself on fire, man.”

He gets his bearings and groans. “It might help.”

I know there is no point trying to persuade him to catch a couple of hours sleep on the couch so I give him his smoke back and bring the teas outside. He peers into his cup, “The colour of mahogany, sir,” he observes.

“A decent cup or what’s the point?” 

“Yes, sir.” 

“I’ll leave you with your quiff in flames next time.”

“My hair was completely flat before I started drinking your tea.”

“That’s all right, you could do with extra height.”

His sleepy smile is unusually contented given the circumstances and we sip our tea, for a while in silence. Morning is starting and we watch the cool sun rise without fuss or display.

My mind wanders back to the case and he glances over, reading me as efficiently as ever, “Is it time to go?” 

“Let’s take half an hour, James, and just think. No computers telling us what to do. Let’s just work through it, like we usually do.”

“You think we’ve missed something?”

“I do and I wish I knew why.”

In the silence I watch the slow twist upwards of smoke from his cigarette, listen to his soft inhale and exhale. 

“She didn’t run off,” I say, though that’s the latest theory. “Her home life is chaotic, her mum not really up to the job but everyone who knows her says she feels responsible for her baby brother. If she was going to run away, she would have taken him with her.”

“So someone took her; at the hall or on her way home.”

“But she didn’t try to walk home because she’s not on any of the CCTV she would have been and anyway she was expecting her mum to come for her. So let’s assume something happened at or near where she was last seen.” 

“Which makes it opportunist because you wouldn’t plan to steal a child when twenty four of her friends and a load of adults are there. So someone she doesn’t know.”

“Someone who saw her looking for her mum. Maybe she wandered off from the rest of the group to find her.” 

He closes his eyes for a moment, “Sir. One of the Book Fair people.”

“Or someone driving by.”

“No, I mean one of the stall holders. The history and biography man, do you remember? You thought there was something off about him.”

I come up with a memory of a good looking white man, no more than thirty five years old. He had been taking part in the book fair on the ground floor of the building while the children had their party upstairs. 

“Hennessy, wasn’t it?”

Statements have been taken from everyone who had a stall at the fair, as well as any of the customers who could be traced or have come forward. James and I had done our share of interviews and we spoke to this man on Monday morning at the address he had given the organisers; a bookshop in Headington.

“You got that look you get. I meant to ask.”

I’ll ask him later about this so-called look but for now I am caught in that moment. Hennessy had seemed friendly and concerned like all the stallholders, wanting to help but hardly aware of the girls and boys being entertained by party games and a magician in a room upstairs. But there was something. 

“He had to think about his name. You asked him to confirm his name and he missed a beat. That was all.” That and a nagging sense of wrongness it is impossible to articulate. “What did you make of him?”

Another cigarette burns out between pale fingers as he thinks back. He shakes his head, “Nothing either way. Sorry. I only noticed your reaction.”

“All right, we’ve got one functioning brain between us, we know that. It might be nothing but it doesn’t hurt to re-interview.”

I phone DCI Rhodes to let him know what we’re planning. He sounds doubtful but, in the absence of any real leads, he doesn’t object. I take over driving through the clear, quiet streets of early morning.

“He’s plausible,” James says. “A child might go with him, even a sensible one. If he said ‘mum sent me’ a little kid would believe him.”

It is a possible scenario. The book fair came to an end just as the birthday party did. In the chaos of cars and collections a child going off with the wrong adult could go unnoticed.

As part of the investigation, the Detective Constable responsible for the victim profile accessed a social worker’s report. Evie had known a succession of mum’s boyfriends, she had been left in the care of strangers often enough it wouldn’t perturb her to be approached by one. Predators have a nose for children whose life is this kind of normal.

Evie’s mother is a lost soul herself, a walking case history. She is ineffectual rather than neglectful in my opinion. James though is unforgiving. If she had been doing her job, he says, this would never have happened. 

For all that, she had intended to collect Evie from the party and had almost managed it. But she was running late, arriving on foot with a pushchair five minutes after the pickup time and, inevitably, waiting in the wrong place, at the wrong exit. By the time she had sorted herself out, her daughter was gone.

***

Arthur Hennessy lives not far from his shop in a narrow, three storey house; part of a long Victorian terrace. Our ringing gets him out of bed and he answers the door in a t-shirt and track suit bottoms.

“Mr Hennessy, sorry to trouble you again, DI Lewis and DS Hathaway.” James shows his warrant card. “We’re following up on Monday’s enquiries.”

“I think there might be a mistake,” he says. “My name is Jan Zelinski.” Just getting in before we can ask to see identification. 

“Why did you tell us your name was Hennessy?” James asks.

“Perhaps you misheard?”

“And the book fair application? You completed the documentation in the name of Arthur Hennessy.”

“My shop is Hennessy Books after the previous proprietor, so that is what I am known as in the trade.”

James turns to me and I ask, “Do you have any objection to Sergeant Hathaway taking a look around the house?”

We do need his permission; we have no warrant and no reasonable grounds for believing Evie is on the premises. He waves us in. His evident willingness to cooperate not boding well for our theory.

James starts his search in the first room off the hallway, a plainly furnished living room, clean and ordered like the rest of the house. I hear him making a call. He will be asking for a check on Zelinski now we have his real name.

While James goes from room to room I sit with Zelinski at his kitchen table. It is another unfussy and spotless room which, I slowly notice, smells strongly of cleaning fluid. I go through the formalities of checking ID and take a second, more detailed statement. He tells me he lives alone and spent Sunday evening after the fair alone, having no contact with anyone until he opened his shop on Monday morning. I try to establish a connection with Evie or her family but he denies any.

People can have lots of reasons for using a false name, but I see what I saw before; the not quite rightness of him, the emptiness behind the eyes where the human should be.

James’ search is slow and methodical, taking in every room including, by the clatter of a loft ladder, the attic. When he comes into the kitchen he is shaking his head to indicate ‘nothing doing’. The kitchen leads out into the garden and Zelinski gives him a key to his shed, unlocking the back door so he can go outside.

When James finishes in the shed, he searches the garden, walking slowly around, crouching to examine something on the ground that catches his eye before moving on.

I see him stop at the far end and look, hands on hips, at the house opposite, another Victorian property showing signs of abandonment and disrepair. Then, unexpectedly, he tips himself over the fence into the house’s garden. I am about to phone him to ask what he’s up to when I hear sirens and cars breaking haphazardly outside. I go to the door. DCI Rhodes is there with half a dozen uniformed officers.

“Roy?”

“Hello Robbie, are you and James all right?” He asks.

“Any reason we shouldn’t be?”

The check James requested has set about seventeen different alarm bells ringing. Zelinski has a history of child related offences along the lines of making and selling images; enough to get him a couple of convictions a decade back. When Rhodes tells him he is being taken in for questioning, he goes with a shrug. 

“James searched,” I tell Rhodes. “Nothing.”

He looks momentarily devastated at the news, “We’re getting permission to turn the house and his shop over. SOCO are on their way.” He looks at the empty space at my shoulder. “Where is James?”

“That’s a good question actually.” I take out my phone. He doesn’t answer. “One of your lads up for breaking and entering?”

“Always.”

I have a feeling there shouldn’t be too many people climbing over the fence or trampling across the garden to get to the property opposite so I take a constable to the next street. She gains entry via the front door to an apparently uninhabited house. The smell of cleaning fluid hits me as I step inside and my stomach turns.

There is no sign of James and no answer when I call his name but this time when I phone, we hear the answering notes of his ringtone from a room above. 

“There’s dripping water from somewhere,” the PC says. The sound is coming from inside the house but there is nothing amiss in the ground floor kitchen or the bathroom on the first floor. “Sir.” As we make our way upstairs she points to the open attic trap door, a loft ladder pulled down. Water is escaping through to the boards beneath. 

The attic is dark apart from scant light coming up from the landing below but when I climb in I see James kneeling on the floor. He has a child cradled in his arms. I recognise Evie, she is dead.

The lid of a large, old water tank is off and water has flooded out from it across the floor, seeping between the joists and through a blanket of disintegrating insulation. James too is soaked. 

I turn to the PC who has followed me and is standing on the ladder, staring in silent horror, “Go and ask DCI Rhodes to come up, and then make sure no one else except SOCO comes into the house or the back garden.” 

“Yes, sir,” she says and darts away.

I crouch down opposite James and Evie.

“I took her out,” he says in a voice so broken I don’t recognise it. “I couldn’t leave her there. I couldn’t leave her.” 

“Of course you couldn’t, James.”

“And now I’ve destroyed all the evidence. What do I do?” 

“You haven’t destroyed any evidence. Do you want to put her down?”

He looks at me, thinks about the question, “No.”

“Do you want me to take her?” He shakes his head. He’s right, the less people who handle her the better.

We wait with the body for what seems like a long time. It would be wrong to look away so I focus on Evie’s dark, mermaid hair, flowing over James’ arm.

Finally DCI Rhodes climbs the ladder. He has a torch which fills the attic with light and causes James to dip his head and close his eyes. Rhodes mutters a curse as he takes in the scene. He directs the torch to the body. A poor, scrap of a thing, Evie seems to have been in the water for more than a day though marks around her nose and mouth suggest asphyxiation rather than drowning as a cause of death. The light swings around to the rest of the attic. It is as dusty as you might expect and cluttered with junk. There are two water tanks, one of which has received a recent clean.

“Can you hang on for a bit?” Rhodes says. “Laura’s on her way.”

He hands me the torch and descends again to go and meet her. We resume our vigil and I watch as the colour slowly drains from James’ face and he starts to shake. 

When Rhodes returns Laura is with him. She stops on the ladder and an expression of despair collapses the architecture of her face before vanishing. She calls an instruction to someone below and when she comes into the attic she has a clean white sheet which she lays out in front of James.

“Thank you, James, you can put her down now.” He gives up the body without a word and then gets to his feet, taking the ladder in two long strides.

I explain what has happened. Laura nods, “That’s fine. Tell him its fine. We won’t have photos but it’s the first thing we would have done.”

“Get him to do a statement,” Rhodes says, shining the torch into the open tank. “You know what we need, the position of the body and so on. Then take the next twenty four hours off, both of you.”

I find James waiting for me on the landing, unmoving among an industrious colony of white suited SOCO. My hand on his back is enough to get him walking; down the stairs and out of the front door where we find a multiplying police and forensic presence, Innocent among them.

“Good work, you two,” she says distractedly. She’s on hold to someone and has another couple of people waiting to speak to her but she glances at James and takes a moment to be alarmed. She gives me an unspoken and unnecessary instruction to ‘see to him’ and I take him round to Zelinski’s house where we’ve left the car. It feels strange to be driving away when the work is just starting. Statements and physical evidence must be gathered anew; now aimed at building a case against Zelinski.

“These people,” James says suddenly, when we are on our way. “These people who think children are possessions to use and throw away.”

I take him home to his flat, fishing his keys from his jacket pocket, going inside with him. He spreads long fingers across his face and when he drops his arms to his side he looks surprised to find me still in the room.

“Shall I help you get warmed up?” I ask. It takes a moment for him to understand what I’m offering, but when he does he lets me take his hand and lead him to the bathroom, “A shower all right?” 

I undress us both, helping him peel away the wet layers of his suit and get us under a scorching shower. We stand together until his body is loose against mine, barely holding his own weight.

“Stay,” he says.

When we are dry but not dressed I take him to bed. We respond to the surprised demands of our bodies, his hand gripping my wrist. He doesn’t surrender his hold on me as he falls asleep and I keep him close, let my fingers stroke through the unexpected softness of his hair. The other time this happened it was shaved close and smoke dry. 

When I wake it is dark again but I see the broad shape of his back. He is sitting up next to me, breathing hard, caught in the slipstream of a nightmare. I reach for him and he turns, dropping down to press his lips to mine; touch, taste, almost a kiss. 

Neither of us sleep again; I can feel his restlessness as a wave washing him away from me but, for the moment, he lets himself be held. I wonder, as I did last time, what he makes of this; what he thinks when he over-thinks it. I will have marks from where he has held tight to me through the night and I can feel the scar tissue of my heart tearing open too. But in a couple of hours, in the ordinary business of our lives, when mermaids smile from paper cups of coffee, it will be as if this never happened.

He gets up first and twenty minutes later he is at the bedroom door, showered and, despite the hour, dressed for work.

“Tea’s on,” he says sounding intensely normal. I can do this too.

“Proper cup please, James. Let the teabag look at the water at least.”

“A good cup of tea is about balance of flavours not taking the silver off the spoon.”

“Shows what you know.”

I might as well take up smoking myself the amount of time I spend on doorsteps with him, but he’s putting distance between us and I’m not ready to let him. He pulls us back to the case.

“We haven’t got to reasonable doubt yet,” he says. 

He’s right, unless something has come up in the meantime, all the evidence is circumstantial. If we can’t find physical or witness evidence connecting Zelinski to the neighbouring house or Evie to Zelinski it is just possible he will get away with it.

“Early days yet,” I say.

“Did you smell those two houses? Bleach. And he’d had a bonfire in the garden, he’ll have burnt both their clothes and everything else she touched.”

“There’ll be something. They’re never as smart as they think they are. What made you check that house?”

“The fence had been climbed over. More than once, the slats were misaligned.”

“Ah, you.”

“I know, clever clogs,” he says with a brief, soft smile. He looks at his phone. “I’m going to go in and see what Dr Hobson’s come up with.”

“We’re off for twenty four hours and I don’t want you anywhere near the nick.” 

Not that he doesn’t ignore many similar instructions on a regular basis.

He turns to me, his shoulder against the wall, “It wouldn’t have made a difference, would it, if we’d have picked up on him when we first questioned him? She was already dead by then.”

“I’d say so.”

“I don’t know if that makes it better or worse.”

“Neither, it is what it is. We had no chance of saving her but at least the family will have some answers, thanks to you.”

I wonder if that will ever be enough for James who had once believed he had a vocation to save, not lives, but souls. He drops his head, in thought or despair, perhaps just simple exhaustion. He is leaning into me, so close I feel his physical presence as strongly as I had in the darkness of his bedroom, in the intimacy of his almost kiss. And then he is gone; turning away, attending to his cigarette, checking email. And then he is gone.

My phone rings as I am watching James fail to eat more than a mouthful of the supper he has put together for us. It is Roy Rhodes, apologising for the interruption. Evie was suffocated, he tells me, dead before she was put in the water probably as early as Sunday evening. Preliminary forensic results are disappointing. As James predicted the two houses have been subjected to a thorough clean. The body has also been washed. The circumstantial evidence is piling up but the direct evidence is, so far, non-existent. To make matters worse Zelinski’s van, which might well be where the murder took place, cannot be found, the assumption being he has ditched it to hide any evidence it might hold.

“Anyway, the reason I’m phoning,” Rhodes says. “I wondered if you could spare James for the interview. Khan’s wife’s gone into labour.”

“That’s about time, isn’t it?”

“It’s been quite a gestation, it’s true. And I could do with Hathaway in there with me.”

Obviously I agree, there is no way to reasonably refuse a request like that, as much as I would like to. When I tell him he doesn’t hesitate. Just another day at the office, he’d have me believe.

The Zelinski interview stretches across the rest of the week and into the weekend, James and Rhodes taking turns to cover the same grim ground. When I can I watch. Zelinski shows little emotion throughout, answering questions with questions, undermining his interviewers, turning a cool intellect against them. It is a chilling performance but James does well. He is calm, methodical and just as unrelenting. He doesn’t get an admission but at least the prosecution will be able to demonstrate the man’s state of mind.

I can see what the process is taking out of him. He disappears at the end of each day before I can speak to him and, when I phone, his assurances are unconvincing. Probably no one else would notice the signs, but he is spending his evenings drinking and he is not sleeping. 

After four days they accept they will get nothing from Zelinski. He is charged with the abduction, rape and murder of a child. The CPS rely on the weight of circumstantial evidence. It ought to be enough.

After he is charged, Zelinski’s van is located, burnt out and abandoned in woodland on the territory of a neighbouring force. Despite the efforts to destroy it, the van is rich in forensic evidence of Evie’s presence. A neighbour, who had been on a business trip during the door to door, also comes forward claiming to have seen Zelinski carrying a bundle from his van to his house on Sunday evening. Roy Rhodes takes a weekend off.

We move on, the incident room is cleared, HOLMES stands down and James and I are called to investigate the death of a man after a fight in the car park of a pub. Drunk attacks stupid with an offensive weapon, it is almost a relief. But things are off between us, we don’t connect as we usually do. Borders secured and a wall up for good measure, he slips out of reach. I don’t know why, but it is James so the explanation won’t be a simple one.

A preliminary hearing is scheduled for the Zelinski case. He changes his plea to guilty on the day and is remanded in custody while a social report is commissioned. James is contemptuous, showing that hard edge of his I occasionally glimpse. So what if Zelinski had an unhappy childhood? “Who didn’t?” He says. 

‘The past beats inside me like a second heart,’ he’d once murmured, in a quoting mood, over one too many pints. He was talking about a murder but I keep the sentiment filed under H for Hathaway.

On the day of the Zelinski hearing a man is found bludgeoned to death on a tour bus and the case takes us to the place James grew up, among the people of his childhood. One evening when I am working late, alone in the office for reasons I don’t yet understand, I look up Crevecoeur on the net. I want to know the meaning of the curious word. The search yields two million broken hearts. I recall James shattering in my arms and this doesn’t surprise me at all.

End

 

October 2014

 


End file.
